The Clapback Mailbag: Who's Gonna Tell Them?

Our weekly response to our readers' DMs, emails and tweets.

Every Friday, we reach into our mailbag to answer emails, comments, DMs and messages.

This week, we decided that it was time for a few uncomfortable conversations with our readers.

From: Lacey
Subject: I told you so?

As a white person who is married to a Black man who is a huge fan of your work, I have learned so much from you. However, when I share your work with some of my white friends, I can also understand why your tone can sting. Some people are turned off by your “I told you so” tone.

I’m not trying to get you to change your writing style. I understand your appreach. However, if your goal is to get white people to change, there might be a better way to approach my wypipo friends. Or maybe you could recommend some writers who make the same point in a less straightforward manner. If not, I totally understand that it is not your job to tailor your message. Either way, I am still a fan and supporter.

From: Paul
Subject: A lesson for you

Saw this and thought it might help you and your self-righteous obsession with blaming white people for everything.

If you don’t know Van Lathan, he is a podcaster and culture critic whose much more successful. You probably share some of the same politics except he knows how to educate people instead of pissing them off. You could learn something from him.

Even if you’re right, sometimes.

Sometimes.

Dear Lacey and Paul,

My cousin Tyran and I grew up as brothers. I think he will agree that I am objectively more handsome and much smarter than he is. He is a better artist, a better musician and more charismatic than I am. Like most of my family, Tyran will just call me to ask a question about an obscure fact or to settle an argument. But if I say it, Tyran will take it as fact. I’m basically Tyran’s own personal Google search bar. And because I am a year older, the interpersonal dynamic of our relationships was clear:

I was the older brother, he was the younger brother.

When I went away to college, Tyran went to culinary school and worked as a short-order cook, a chef and a sous chef in various restaurants. So when my aunt Jannie, who is objectively the worst cook in the family, decided to open a restaurant, of course, she hired Tyran to run it. As chef and manager, Tyran was also adamant about hiring formerly incarcerated people to work in the restaurant.

During the summers, I would go down to the small town of Denmark, S.C., and work in Aunt Jannie’s restaurant, which was extremely difficult for me. My tribulations had nothing to do with spending all day in a hot kitchen — I was accustomed to that. But in the restaurant, I was not Tyran’s smarter, older brother. He knew more people and had all the answers to everyone’s questions.

I’m sure it was hard for him, too. In the beginning, I challenged him all the time. But Tyran was not an arguer. Whenever I challenged him, instead of arguing with me, he would look at me, sigh, and say: “Aight, Mikey. But when you fuck it up, just remember how I told you.” Unfortunately (for me), Tyran was really good at restauranting. He was always right. I was always wrong. I would always eventually use his method. But for some reason, I could never grasp the idea that Tyran was always right and I was always wrong.

Until I learned about pudd’n.

For breakfast, the restaurant served a pork substance called liver pudding that lowcountry South Carolinians love. My family doesn’t eat pork, so I’d never heard of it before, but it’s basically a paste made from pork liver and ground-up pig parts and sometimes rice. Whenever someone ordered it, the short-order cook would put it in a shallow frying pan with a little oil, cover it and shake the pan over the fire. I thought there was a better way — cooking it on the flat-top grill with a spatula.

“Why not put on the grill?” I asked.

“This is how Tye taught me,” he explained.

Unphased, I dumped the pudding on the grill just as Tye walked in. “Mike, you really should use a pot,” he said.

“Nah, I’mma do it like this,” I said, while adding a little oil. “ Why are you backing up?”

Tyran didn’t have to answer.

I don’t know if you know this, but when you mix rice and oil on an open grill, the rice basically turns into an explosive device. When that oily rice popped off the grill, the buttery-soft pigmeat paste decided to join the party and stuck to my spatula-flipping arm like wristbands. If you want to know how it feels, imagine wearing handcuffs dipped in hot grease and covered in boiling grits. Not only did I gain a newfound respect for Al Green that day, but I also learned a valuable lesson:

Stop acting white.

When Black people proclaim “I told you so,” they aren’t doing it out of a sense of superiority or to gloat. They aren’t even trying to prevent people from fuck around and finding out. They just know how white supremacy works.

IT EXPLODES.

Whether it's tariffs, DOGE, DEI, race-based slavery or Jim Crow, Black people have been burned by every bad idea that white people ever had. Not only do we have to dodge the shrapnel, we are the ones who have to clean up the mess while white people salve their wounds.

If you can’t take advice from people who had to fight harder to participate in politics, whose advice will you take? If you aren’t going to listen to the people who built America’s economy and disproportionately carry the burden of every economic misstep, then who? If the people with more experience, education and expertise can’t convince them to do the right thing, who can?

Who’s gonna tell them?

After helping with my 6th-degree burns, Tyran showed me where he had burned his wrists trying the same thing. To this day, I still have matching pudd’n scars. But unlike Tyran, my pudding scars were not the result of my ignorance. They came from something even worse:

Mike supremacy.

The following two letters are emblematic of a common criticism I receive: